Sea of Tranquility(25)

“How do you know where I live?”

“I walk by your house too,” she said. “I cut through your neighbor’s lawn to get to the Periphery.”



* * *



—

At the end of our lawn there was a screen of leaves. Push through them and you’d get to the Periphery Road, which circled the interior of the Night City dome. Cross the road and there was a strange, wild area, no more than fifty feet deep, a strip of wilderness between the road and the dome. Scrub brush, dust, stray plants, garbage. It was a forgotten kind of place. Our mother didn’t like us playing there, so Zoey never ventured across the Periphery Road—she always did as she was told, which I found maddening—but I liked the wildness of it, the mild sense of danger inherent in a forgotten kingdom. That day after school I crossed the empty road for the first time in a few weeks, and stood for a while with my hands pressed to the dome, looking out. The composite glass was so thick that everything on the other side looked like a dream, distant in a muffled kind of way, but I saw craters here and there, meteors, gray. The opaque dome of Colony One glowed in the near distance. I found myself wondering what Talia Anderson’s thoughts were when she gazed out at the moonscape.



* * *



—

Talia Anderson transferred out of my class and left the neighborhood halfway through the year. I didn’t see her again until my mid-thirties, when we were both employed by the Grand Luna Hotel in Colony One.

I started work at the hotel about a month after my mother died. She’d been sick for a long time, years, and at the end Zoey and I all but lived at the hospital. That last week we were there every day and every night, exhausted comrades keeping watch, while our mother murmured and slept. Death was imminent and remained imminent, for much longer than the doctors predicted. Our mother had worked at the post office since we were very young, but in her last hours she thought she was doing postdoctoral work in a physics lab again, murmuring in a confused way about equations and the simulation hypothesis.

“Do you understand what she’s talking about?” I asked Zoey at one point.

“Most of it,” Zoey said. In those hours Zoey sat by the bed with her eyes closed, listening to our mother’s words as if listening to music.

“Can you explain it to me?” It was like being on the outside of a secret club, nose pressed to the glass.

“The simulation hypothesis? Yeah.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”

I’d been awake for two days and felt like I was dreaming. “Okay, but if we’re living in a computer,” I said, “whose computer is it?”

“Who knows? Humans, a few hundred years into the future? An alien intelligence? It’s not a mainstream theory, but it comes up every so often at the Time Institute.” She opened her eyes. “Oh god, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have.”

“Pretend you didn’t say what?”

“The Time Institute part.”

“Okay,” I said, and her eyes closed again. I closed my eyes too. Our mother had stopped murmuring, and now there were just her ragged breaths, with too much time between each one.

When at last the end came, Zoey and I were sleeping. She woke me in the exhausted gray light of early morning, and we sat together for a long time in silence, in reverence, before the stilled figure of our mother on the bed. We dealt with the formalities, hugged goodbye, went our separate ways. I returned home to my cramped apartment, and several days passed where I spoke only with my cat. There was the funeral, then more stillness. I needed a new job—I’d been without one for some time, and was burning through my savings—and so a month after the funeral I found myself in the basement office of a hotel Human Resources officer, a vaguely familiar-looking woman with blond hair, accepting a position that had been advertised as “hotel detective” but whose exact parameters were unclear.

“To be absolutely honest,” I told her, “I’m not entirely clear on what a hotel detective position might entail.”

“It’s just hotel security,” she said. I realized I’d forgotten her name. Natalie? Natasha? “The job title wasn’t my idea. You won’t actually be a detective. Just a security presence, as it were.”

“I want to be sure I’m not misrepresenting myself,” I said. “I left school a few months shy of my criminal justice degree.”

“Can we be honest here, Gaspery?” There was definitely something familiar about her.

“Please.”

“Your entire job is to pay attention to what goes on around you and call the police if you see anything suspicious.”

“I can do that.”

“You sound doubtful,” she said.

“I’m not doubtful for myself. I mean, I don’t doubt I could do it. It’s just, I’m—couldn’t anyone do this job?”

“You’d be surprised. It’s the attention part that’s hard to hire for,” she said. “Distraction is a problem, generally speaking. You remember that test you had to take on your first interview?”